Behemoth (book) - Criticism of Hobbes' Views On Rebellion

Criticism of Hobbes' Views On Rebellion

Immanuel Kant, one of the leading intellects of the Age of Enlightenment, had a different view on the nature of rebellions from Hobbes. Howard Williams, of the University of Wales, in 2003 wrote a study comparing the views of the two great thinkers on the subject of revolution amongst other things. Hobbes saw all revolution as something that should be avoided at all costs. Hobbes expressed society as a combination of the people, as the body of the society, and the monarchy, as the soul of the society, making a healthy commonwealth. Without the soul the body dies and so it is with society for Hobbes. Civil war should be avoided because it is "the process of a society losing its soul". In this book Williams describes Hobbes writing of Behemoth as an attempt to "capture the spirit of those awful times and to suggest emphatically that they should not be repeated". Hobbes did not believe that anything positive came out of the civil war.

Kant, according to Williams, shares the same basic attitude to the resistance of sovereign power but does not think that all outcomes of Rebellion are necessarily negative. Kant is writing about the French Revolution, not the English Civil War, in his book The Conflict of the Faculties. Written more than 100 years after Hobbes wrote Behemoth, it has as its focus the idea that rebellions arouse sympathy in other countries for the people caught up in them. Kant says that this is due to a "moral disposition within the human race". Going further Kant, according to Williams, implies that uprisings are the wrong solution to a problem with governance but that there can still be something positive in the results of that uprising.

Hobbes does not think that there is any sort of innate morality in society and that rebellion is either "an unwise or failed experiment as a complete blunder arising from ignorance". Instead, according to Williams, Hobbes has sympathy not for the common people caught up in the rebellion but instead for those who were the victims of the rebellion. This is in keeping with the royalist stance taken by Hobbes in Behemoth. The French Revolution was not the only source for Kant's views on rebellion. He took into account the American Revolutionary War and the English Civil war as well as the views of classical thinking on the nature of republics. Hobbes, of course, could not do this. Kant as well was more of an observer than a participant in the events of these revolutions. Hobbes was deeply affected by the Civil war and believed that rebellion would not be a solution. Instead "only an absolute sovereign power could teach 'the science of just and unjust', fixing meanings in a stable way and thus inducing social cohesion".

Hobbes then is a supporter of an "absolute sovereignty, embodied in a monarch or corporate body of individuals; Kant is a supporter of popular sovereignty, embodied in the law-making powers of a group of the people's representatives". Another key difference between the two philosophers is the way that the laws of the land should be administered. An absolute monarch, for Hobbes, implies that the authority of that monarch "must be beyond question, whereas for Kant the sovereign's authority is best safeguarded through the possibility of public debate and criticism". These fundamental differences in thinking are perhaps more to do with the differences in the eras the two philosophers lived in. Hobbes lived a hundred years before Kant. Additionally Hobbes experienced rebellion first hand, even to the point of fleeing England for fear of his personal safety, whereas Kant did not directly suffer during the rebellions that occurred in his lifetime. Another consideration was that in the course of a century much more had been written on the subject of the rights of the people and of liberty and this too must have been an influence on Kant's point of view. This does not negate Hobbes' views on rebellion but does illuminate a probable cause for his position on them.